Righteous
by Five Minutes Til Bedtime
Summary: Kurt doesn't like religion, not because he hates the idea of a God, but because of the people that idea has created. One-shot.


Title: **Righteous**

Summary: Kurt doesn't like religion, not because he hates the idea of a God, but because of the people that idea has created. One-shot.

Fandom: Glee

Word Count: 881

WARNING: THIS MIGHT BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME RELIGIOUS READERS. I am not trying to bash on religion, God, or anyone who believes in either. I am merely imaging what might be going on in Kurt's head.

* * *

The thing about religion, Kurt thought bitterly, was that the same people who preached about loving your neighbor and doing no harm were the same people who would beat you up with a self-righteous smirk on their face. Kurt knew bullies. Knew them better than he knew friendships or any family relationship apart from the one he shared with his father and dead mother. Of all the bullies he had ever encountered, it was only the religious ones that ever scared him.

Teenage boys were notorious for their short attention spans. They'd punch Kurt, toss a few slushies, and quickly grow bored. He might get it a little harder than the average high school reject but it wasn't anything personal. Noah Puckerman fell into this category for – though he was an admittedly devout Jew – nothing he ever did was about Kurt, only his own reputation. Puckerman didn't care whether it was the gay kid or the smart kid or the fat kid that he was shoving to lockers, just so long as someone saw him do the shoving.

But the bullies who had a deeper reason for hating him – who had taken the greatest love story ever told and made it into a tale about hate – those were the ones Kurt feared most of all. To them, harming Kurt wasn't pastime but a sacred duty. It wasn't their reputation, but their very soul that they were bargaining with. Kurt could tell them by the glint in their eye, the inflection in their voice as they hissed _'fag' _at him, the hatred in their scowls as they pummeled Kurt as though he had personally done them wrong.

That was just it. To them, it was personal. To Kurt, it was hell.

Kurt had been religious before his mother died. She would take him to church every Sunday, letting him color and watch her as she sang in the choir. After she died, the church became just another painful memory for Kurt and his father. When middle school began, and the bullying took off, it was just another reason to avoid the place.

Despite this Kurt had made the effort as a teenager to read through the Bible cover to cover. He had long since stopped actually believing, but he thought he should at least know the book that everyone said condemned him.

The funny thing was, though he read it thoroughly, Sodom and all, Kurt could never think of the book as anything less than a guide to how not to be a jerk. It was, in simplest terms, an outline to being a better person and many themes that ran through its ancient pages were ones that Kurt followed unquestionably already.

So why then was this book a source of so much pain in Kurt's life?

He didn't know. Frankly, he couldn't make sense of any of it.

He didn't understand how his own personal, private love could offend so many people he would never see the faces of. He didn't how his being gay could lead to him fearing slushies and locker slams and dumpers dives every day. Or how it could lead him to looking carefully over his shoulder when he left school – making sure never to walk alone at night – flinching away from any crowd of males over the age of thirteen, imaging his dad's face when his body was found in a ditch somewhere, or dragged into a corn field to be beat up and die.

He didn't understand any of it, but it was the reality that he lived in. Dramatic as it seemed, these things had happened to boys like Kurt by other boys like those who tossed red dye number 7 in his eyes each day and bombarded him with pee balloons.

Oddly, it was not even the actual physical bullying that plague him most of all. The phone calls were the worst. Nameless, faceless hatred pouring into his sacred home – boys, teenagers, men, woman, girls – he'd received calls from all of them. Some of the voices he recognized from school. Those he didn't fear. It was the ones that he didn't know – whose cold, hard words came in low stranger's promises for a sin that Kurt had been born with.

He imagined meeting those voices in person, with the hateful eyes and the strong body to go with it. He was wary of strangers and skittish around friends. He avoided churches and church groups and people who wore crosses around their necks and knelt by their bed each night.

Kurt didn't hat religion, but it was extremely hard not to fear some of the people that practiced it.

It made no sense really. Most of his friends in glee belonged to some religion, including his best friend Mercedes. He knew that they were good people who for the most part cared about him and would never intentionally hurt him.

But he couldn't help the shiver that would run through him when they got up to sing about God. It wasn't reverence but fear. Not goosebumps but a tremble, a miniature crack in the boy who was Kurt Hummel.

So he packed his bag and left because, no offense of God, but religion would never be anything but another bully standing in his way.


End file.
